Are we watching the same incident here? It looks like a horde of boys who are upset at the lady who said something mean about a friend of theirs managed to get her sacked. And yet you are trying to say that SJWs are ruining everything?
meh double post :)
The problem is that the media has made this look like her firing was the result of sexism. It makes the company look bad, when in fact it was the writer who provoked it. She was the one who brought gender into the equation. The guy had a different opinion from her, and didn’t try to force it on her or anything, and she accused him of being condescending towards her.
No. That was her father.
I see your side quite easily.
However, do you think that male developers just as consistently face calm and polite expositions from streamers about how they should be doing their job? Perhaps the gender thing was always there but we don’t notice it?
Whenever people find out I’m a teacher, they always manage to tell me what is wrong with the system. Obviously, going through school for 12 years makes you an expert on education, except for the fact that it doesn’t. I can’t help but feel the same about gaming. Non-experts blithely expounding ideas and concepts to people who have already considered them, probably in a much more serious and considered manner.
Apparently women are also frequently pushed into the public relations area when they would rather not be there (as Ms Price has stated for herself). The whole Gamergate phenomenon has already revealed the awful underbelly of gaming’s treatment of females. We can’t pretend it isn’t there.
So, perhaps we can combine two things- a very snippy writer combined with an entitled audience of people and you are going to get a problem. I’m just wondering who thought it was a good idea to make her do it in the first place. It’s not like she hadn’t made it clear what her beliefs and values are in the first place.
As stusser said, there’s more to this story. It feels like someone decided to give her enough rope to hang herself.
I only watch Hearthstone streamers, but they tell the devs how to do their job all the time (“card X is op and needs a nerf”). I’m sure Price gets a lot of extra crap for being a woman developer, so it’s sort of forgivable that she would lose her cool at some point, but the professional thing to do would be apologize rather than double down. I’m sure Arenanet would have been satisfied with an apology, but clearly she still thinks she did nothing wrong.
Except in this very specific example, a person replied to her tweet in a polite way to differ with her opinion. Nothing was gender-related or accusatory or entitled sounding in his reply.
Who gave her rope? She tweeted something and got a reasoned reply and went off on the person. None of that was Anet’s doing. I suspect they were already unhappy with her and this pushed the situation over the edge. She was clearly out of line.
Sometimes we don’t see our own entitlement. What comes off as polite to you may be condescending to others. I hate getting into these sort of discussions because I know little about the people with whom I’m discussing and can’t pick out the nuance that I could face to face. I’ve been around this forum long since you began it with Tom and I know enough to tell that you are discussing this in good faith. Not everyone is given that room.
As a case in point, this forum was inflicted by Gman. He admitted to basically using this forum to experiment with different ways to articulate Breitbart talking points, making this place a test bed to create better ways of promoting bad faith reporting. He was very polite. Everyone noted how polite he was. Even when he was outed as a part of the cancer that is undermining our democracy, you still had people wringing their hands over the hostile treatment that he received from some nasty liberal types here. Because he was polite.
Anyway, my kind of weak observation is that just because someone is polite, it doesn’t stop them being an ass. And sometimes people can be too tired, sick or simply over all this shit to keep on replying to friendly walruses who just feel the need to make their points known.
Since I’m pretty flu ridden at the moment, I’ll just concede that this is just my take: she did the wrong thing professionally but didn’t deserve to be fired for it.
I get that, but in this particular case nothing in the twitter reply by the guy struck me that way. And if you’re talking nuance, shouldn’t you give the benefit of the doubt if unsure?
Her response struck me as very much out of line and not a good look for someone representing the company. I didn’t think it was fireable, but I’m guessing she may have been a difficult person to work with. She also must be very tone deaf if she celebrated TB’s death. Who does that?
That sounds quite interesting. Could you point me towards some old threads or anything that would encapsulate those events?
The site owner has already said this was not the case.
When I read Deroir’s posts, I see it bookended with a certain kind of pro forma politeness, but there’s a limit to what a “Interesting post!” preface can scrub away from the actual content of the posts. Now, what he said is totally the sort of thing you’d expect one side to say in a debate over game design… But the context wasn’t a debate until he made it so. And when he did that, did he do it in a way that recognized the difference in experience between himself and his interlocutor? No. Did he ask if maybe she had already considered his insights? No. Did he ask if she wanted to hear a contrary opinion? No. He presumed he could correct her analysis “slightly.”
We expect to see this kind of presumptuousness–and much worse–on the internet all the time. But women see it a lot more, especially in spaces like tech and gaming where mostly male fans feel that their passion and time investment qualifies them for special insights. For many of us, including many women I suspect, this behavior would just roll off their backs because it is so commonplace. But just because that’s true doesn’t make the sticking of it in Price’s craw a crime on her part.
She could have responded in a pedagogical way, trying to help the respondent understand how he was being presumptuous or why she saw him as being so. That would have been constructive. Maybe he would have been open to that, and everyone could have walked away feeling edified. Instead she was fairly blunt and impatient. On her personal Twitter account, I think she’s allowed to be. (Her profile actually reads “I won’t play demure for you,” so we were all duly warned.)
She also made it quite clear that she thinks if she were a male designer, she would have gotten a different response. On this front, I’m going to trust her instincts, because she gets to see the treatment of women in this industry first hand in a way that I really don’t. His reply? “This doesn’t have anything to do with gender. Never did. Never will.” Not even an ounce of self-examination, it seems.
As for ArenaNet, if there were extenuating circumstances outside this incident, then that’s when they especially need to avoid the perception that it was this one incident that resulted in her firing. In fact, they said the opposite: She didn’t maintain the standards expected in dealing with fans, so she was terminated.
A certain toxic subset of fans (which Deroir is not necessary a part of) later posted on Reddit that this is a strategy they can use to direct the development of GW2 and attack resistant developers:
This is a whole other level of presumption. It’s bluster. It’s wishful thinking. It’s also the fruits of ArenaNet not standing up for their employees. I doubt things will actually work the way the poster thinks, but now they’ve certainly encouraged more of the same from certain fans, and probably without the veneer of politeness.
There are so many other ways she could have responded, or simply not responded. She chose a poor way, a combative way. She may say it’s a personal account and she’s not speaking officially, but the reality is she was seen as a company rep and she should have known as much. Poor judgement on her part, and not really excusable.
But again, I suspect this was only part of what was going on. She simply may not have been a good employee, all things considered.
It also happens basically 100% of the time a game company publicly fires, demotes, or otherwise reprimands an employee. I distinctly remember the same reactions when the lead of Diablo 3 got reassigned (at least in part to how that game initially turned out). It’s not specific to any situation; most people love to convince themselves that “I did it” and social media makes it a lot easier to believe so. Nevertheless, Arenanet’s not going to be taking polls for hire/fire decisions anytime soon.
I’m not concerned about the actual ability for trolls to drive design changes in the game. I think it just encourages more toxic behavior, which is unfortunate, if somewhat unavoidable.
A screenshot of a reddit post that was deleted and I guess restored through removereddit or something. It got to -6 before it was deleted. This is your criminal mastermind. I’m over-fucking-whelmed.
Frankly, I’m insulted that you didn’t at least photoshop this to take the negative sign off the 6.
I keep jumping in here thinking “ooo, people are talking about GW2, wonder what’s up now” and it’s not about the game at all.
So, after all this time playing my Sylvari Daredevil at level 80, I have to say that this stage of the game is not quite as enjoyable as the rise to level 80 was. Gear changes have happened so few and far between, and there’s so little advancement in abilities, that I feel like it’s just doing the same thing over and over (mainly because it is, as I level up masteries). Oh, sure, there’s plenty to do, but so much of it requires joining up with others that I tend to jump in, play a short while, and leave to play something else. Still fun, just not at the same level as the exploration of the original world areas was.
I really should start a new character some day to keep it fresh.
I don’t know what you think I think the screenshot proves. All I said is that it indicates that there are people out there who will use this as an excuse for additional toxic behavior. I’m not talking about any kind of mastermind, I’m talking about trolls, whose existence on the internet is hard to deny, and whose capacity to be emboldened by well-meaning actors is pretty much their defining characteristic.
My mind keeps coming back to @tomchick’s Fast Times clip. This GW2 situation really is summed up in that.
Someone used a tool that shows deleted posts and then trawled through a whole thread to find a dumb deleted comment. If you put that much effort into finding something to be offended by, is that any better than being a troll?
It was just an example of people on the internet being dicks, not that we needed to prove that theorem, but there’s no need to crawl up his ass about it.